How Expanded Iran Sanctions Can Affect Global Politics and Middle East Crisis

Recently  the European Council expanded sanctions on Iran to include the country’s missile capabilities. This comes just a month after Iran launched an air attack on the Israeli after an airstrike resulted in the deaths of Iranian generals on a diplomatic mission in Syria. The EU has said that this expansion stems from Iran’s continued support for the Russian war effort in Ukraine and its supply of weapons beyond drones to non-state groups. Tehran has since denied any involvement in supplying weapons to Russia and has reiterated Iran’s right to defend itself against ‘brazen Israeli aggression’. 

These new sanctions allow the EU to target individuals and networks supplying Iranian militant groups, and subject them to asset freezes and travel bans to the EU. They’ve been joined by the US, further clamping down since Iran and India signed a 10-year contract to operate the strategic port of Cabahar – part of India’s vision for the future of Central Asia. Whilst many support further sanctions, with the Netherlands, Sweden and the Czech Republic calling for the  Iranian Revolutionary Guards to be designated as a terrorist organisation following  their actions in Israel. 

Forming part of the “axis of resistance” against Western influence in the Middle East, the Guards coordinates with militant groups across the Middle East, including its fellow axis members: the Hizbollah in Lebanon, Houthi rebels in Yemen, Iraqi militias and Hamas in Gaza. The Revolutionary Guards emerged after Iran’s revolution in 1979 in order to protect the new Islamic regime. Since then, they have been openly hostile to U.S. and Israeli influence, controlling large parts of the Iranian economy and defying Western sanctions through rapidly expanding regional control. 

Many in Europe are cautious to designate the Guards as a terrorist group, and rightly so. Not only is it very unusual to regard another nation’s military as a terrorist organisation, but the legal groundwork for such a move has also not yet been fulfilled – Iran is yet to launch an attack in the EU. There are other causes for concern, however. Earlier in April UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that the Guards were a ‘significant threat’, and many UK officials believed that designating them a terror organisation would compel Tehran to cut diplomatic ties with the UK.

Hundreds of thousands of British citizens live in Iran, and, already at risk of detainment, regional turmoil in the Middle East threatens to tip the balance of power further towards Iran. 

Tehran’s actions against Israel in mid-April stretched open the gaping wound that is the Middle East, threatening both a wider conflict across the entire region and a war on two fronts. The war in Gaza has ignited an international response that has erupted everywhere from public parks to university campuses. A few days ago, I bore witness to just one part of a nationwide, pro-Palestinian encampment outside the Queens’ Building at Queen Mary University of London. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to seeing how the British public are digesting what is happening in the Middle East. Whilst one of the privileges of living or studying in London is the diversity of all the lives I play a small part in, such diversity has shown the second front of the war in the Middle East. 

Whilst air attacks, tweets and op-eds are exchanged in a centuries-long dispute over a right to belong, the UK and the Western world is being engulfed in another culture war; one of protest, hate speech and discrimination. The war is being waged not just in Gaza. 

The sanctions placed on Iran will have little effect on what they wish to achieve, besides, their ambitions do not take them further than the Middle East – the axis of resistance’ entire mission is to relieve the Middle East of Western influence. Furthermore, Iran has been burdened by sanctions for decades, a few more will not have the desired effect that the West intends. Yet, go a step further and designate the Iranian military as a terrorist organisation, then the consequences will be catastrophic the West, the Middle East, dual nationals, citizens, and non-citizens, innocent and guilty. 

The sanctions placed on Iran will have little effect on what they wish to achieve, besides, their ambitions do not take them further than the Middle East – the axis of resistance’ entire mission is to relieve the Middle East of Western influence.

At home, what we ought to be concerned with is the growing distance between our governments and our governed here in the West. In London, I read headlines of the US and UK’s support for Israel, yet I walk out onto streets and streets of students and young people under the banner of Palestinian freedom. They’re not alone. Oxford, LSE, Melbourne, Duke, Columbia, and Harvard are among other universities that have taken to protest and encampment against genocide. They face an almost insurmountable task; an entire business and political elite stacked against them. A pro-Israel culture in the US has seen a notoriously unreliable law enforcement wreak havoc among those standing with the Palestinian people at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). 

I’m not going to weigh my own political opinions into this, that’s not why I’m here. I’m here to prevent further destruction, pain, and anger from escalating; to prevent students being harassed into giving up standing for what they believe in; to prevent protests that don’t align with government policy from being dismantled; to prevent a war on two fronts. 

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Archie Rankin is Fellow of the Sixteenth Council